Mellanox and Microsoft performed preliminary benchmark tests and their results show up to 5X faster application performance using Mellanox InfiniBand compared to non-RDMA-based 10Gb/s solutions.

“These benchmark results validate the application performance boost that our RDMA-enabled interconnect solutions deliver,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “End-users will now be able to benefit from the application acceleration gains and the high efficiency the solution delivers.”

The companies claim that the new performance results were enabled by the new SMB Direct protocol that was developed by Microsoft.

This protocol leverages Mellanox RDMA technology, and is part of the SMB2.2 (Server Message Block) implementation.

This data center, according to a release, supports higher scalability and maximizes the number of virtual machines, which results in lower total cost-of-ownership.

"With this new technology, customers can access storage over the network at the speed of local storage,” said Mike Schutz, senior director, Windows Server and Virtualization, at Microsoft. “As a result, a virtualized server infrastructure can utilize shared JBOD storage through the use of RDMA-enabled network interface cards (RNICs). This approach significantly increases data center efficiency."